Laura Miller Quotes

Buying a book is not about obtaining a possession, but about securing a portal.

A faint smell of lilac filled the air. There was always lilac in this part of town. Where there were grandmothers, there was always lilac.

The first book we fall in love with shapes us every bit as much as the first person we fall in love with.

People like to complain about the state of contemporary literature, but I can only assume they don't read it very widely.

Of all the butterflies that chose to stay, I’m in love with the one that got away.

Adventure ... is what might otherwise be called hardship if it were attempted in a different spirit.

But there is so much more to do for the city we love... a Dallas with roads as strong as our businesses, parks as beautiful as our children, a downtown as tall as our imagination.

Nonfiction brought me back to earth and sobered me up whenever it seemed like I'd become too drunk on the lives and loves of imaginary people, but that doesn't mean it was any less thrilling or transporting, although it was often more illuminating.

The city has to do what any citizen or family does, when you have a dream. You tighten your belt. You sacrifice some luxuries. Above all, you don't waste a dime.

In the year since we brought things into the open with a clean breath of fresh air at City Hall, we have learned about corrupt spending practices and unethical conflicts of interest that waste your money... and keep Dallas from being the great city of our dreams.

Writers would be warm, loyal, and otherwise terrific people-if only they'd stop writing.

Now it's time to focus on basics for people in our neighborhoods... and real ethics reform at City Hall.

There is so much chaos and dysfunction going on with the federal government that Dallas can't wait any longer for federal help.

The conditions conducive to deep thought have become increasingly rare in our highly mediated lives... Now we live in an attention economy, where the most in-demand commodity is 'eyeballs.

Tracking the shiny is so much easier than digging for gold!

Dallas is a great city, and it's worth fighting for.

Dallas is a positive, get-it done city.

For while agents and editors often misunderstand their market and sometimes reject good or even great works, they do prevent a vast quantity of truly execrable writing from being published.

A great novelist excels on the small scale and the large, the individual leaf and root as well as the forest; good fiction convinces us that the imaginary is real by selecting exactly the right detail and rendering it perfectly.

In many ways, our campaign this year will be the same as last time: We're still going to focus on fixing up basics and cleaning up ethics at City Hall.

Maybe everything really does just have an expiration date--one that you can't see until she tells you she's leaving, and then she's gone.

Make no mistake, the organizations website counsels. You will be writing a lot of crap. And thats a good thing. By forcing yourself to write so intensely, you are giving yourself permission to make mistakes. To forgo the endless tweaking and editing and just create. I am not the first person to point out that writing a lot of crap doesnt sound like a particularly fruitful way to spend an entire month, even if it is November.

Do the children who prefer books set in the real, ordinary, workaday world ever read as obsessively as those who would much rather be transported into other worlds entirely?

Adventure,' then, is what might otherwise be called hardship if it were attempted in a different spirit. Turning a difficult task or a perilous journey into an adventure is largely a matter of telling yourself the right story about it, which is one thing that Lewis's child characters have learned from reading, 'the right books.

Dreams would always end with you, and then mornings would steal you away with a cruelty that haunted my days.